 For Authors: May 20, 2015 Issue [#6993] |
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This week: The Eight Parts of Speech Edited by: NaNoNette  
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The Eight Parts of Speech
It's okay to use all of them.
"It was a long wait to get into the all-ages club, especially on a Sunday, and not much generally happened in line. The bouncers were fierce and would come down instantly on anyone who looked like they were going to start trouble."
Excerpt from City of Bones by Cassandra Clare.
I use the above sentences to show that it sometimes takes a lot of adjectives to give color and texture to a scene. There are so many times here on Writing.Com when reviews have a nearly automatic bit of advice to "drop at least half your adjectives." Buy why? What is it that makes descriptive writing bad? Frankly, I don't get it. When I read this book for the first time, before joining Writing.Com, I enjoyed it for what it was. After being a member here for a while, I took on that feeling that adjectives, ~ly adjectives in particular are something to avoid and this feeling diminished my enjoyment for this book when I re-read it. In the case of my own writing, this lead to bad grammar decisions because sometimes a ~ly adjective is the grammatically correct form, but I was afraid to use it.
The eight parts of speech in English are:
Verb: action or state.
Noun: thing or person.
Adjective: describes a noun.
Adverb: describes a verb, adjective or adverb.
Pronoun: replaces a noun.
Preposition: links a noun to another word.
Conjunction: joins clauses or sentences or words.
Interjection: short exclamation, sometimes inserted into a sentence.
From the earliest grades in elementary school, students are encouraged to use all of these in their writing. Of course you've got to make sure your dialogue has a bit more to it than a bunch of interjections, but even overusing those might be okay when writing how kids and teenagers speak.
Writers: don't be afraid to describe what you want your reader to see. If it takes a boatload of adjectives, then go for it.
Readers and reviewers: ask yourself if those adjectives you're attacking are grammatical mistakes, or if you're just too sensitive because it's one of those "rules" that have been said so many times, it has to be true?
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For my last newsletter "Capture Inspiration" , I got the following responses:
benjwriter14 wrote: I don't like the word inspiration. It feel cheep, almost mystical in its effect on our abilities. I do agree that as writers we do need to be observant and take literal or mental notes of the world around us but at the same time we need to buck up and write, inspired or not. That's called being a professional. That's the piece of advice I've heard. If you want to be a professional, act like it. That means hard work and dedication and pushing through the uninspired moments. That's what I hated so much about Stephenie Meyer's story. She had a dream, woke up wrote three blockbuster novels and never struggled with it the way we all do, day in and day out. She sites inspiration as her catalyst. Sounds like hokus-pocus to me. I suppose if you can find it, and hold on to it, then go with it.
I'm not going to defend my word choice here. When I wrote inspiration, I meant something closer to "make literal or mental notes," but I didn't go into detail. Over the years, I've realized many a writer gets allergic to one word or the other and then becomes obsessed with it. Passive verbs such as "was" and "had" get a bad shake all the time. Or the evil adjectives, those forbidden ~ly words. I've found when reading with those blinders on, I miss too much of what was really said. So, put into "inspiration" what you want. Personally, I'm not allergic to any one word just because some writer found it cool to pretend hammering out several novels didn't take any effort on her part.
ENB  wrote: I find that I write my best tragic or depressing scenes when I sit outside on a cloudy, windy day. My happy scenes, on the other hand, are the best when the weather is spring-like and sunny but not too hot. So yeah, my writing likes to mimic the weather... a lot! 
Nice! That's good advice to take. |
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